It's not just political miscalculation

Tuesday

Jan 26, 2010 at 2:00 AM

Reporting for duty, equal parts contrite and disgusted.

BRENT HAROLD

Reporting for duty, equal parts contrite and disgusted.

Well, not really equal parts.

I confess that when I left for vacation a week before the special Senate election, I didn't even think about an absentee ballot. Didn't think my vote would be needed. So blame me. I've met a number of people on the island of Vieques devoting some of their beach time to mea culpas and self-flagellation.

One of the main lines of thinking about how Martha Coakley lost is that progressives like us got careless and took the election too lightly. The lesson to be learned: Don't take anything for granted. We've got the numbers, just gotta get 'em out.

That strikes me as, from the progressive point of view, the optimistic, the comfortable analysis, shot through with denial.

Many pundits are suggesting for Dems and progressives much darker meaning. The Republican victory in this liberal state is being taken as a referendum on President Obama, on health care, on the whole "yes we can" of a year ago. Scott Brown, so this way of thinking goes, rode the wave of anger vs. health care and its proponent-in-chief, the president.

Until a month ago anyone would have bet on Coakley. It would have been a good bet. You would have had to be very cynical, very negative about fellow humans to believe that this supposedly most liberal of states could so quickly turn on the Kennedy liberal legacy. What did the decades of support for the policies of the Senate's liberal lion mean if so many of us could turn right around and vote for an anti-Kennedy?

Oh sure, show us a handsome guy of completely different politics, we'll vote for him. Who would have thought it?

And who would have thought that people were so fickle that mere association with the president and his health care program would be the touch of death for Coakley?

Yes, the potential efficiency, clarity and cost savings of a truly reformed system have been muddied and lost in the political shuffle. I too wish Obama had just said clearly from the start and stuck to it: If we don't go single payer, if we don't eliminate the insurance industry from the equation, all bets are off. There are models for how it works all around us; if we don't use what works for them, we won't get their results.

On the other hand, Obama is the most thoughtful, inspired, genuinely caring president we've had in generations. If Brown won because Obama is having a tough time selling genuine health care reform, that's an indictment not of the president or Coakley but of the electorate and their reps in Congress.

Neither Scott Brown nor the insurance industry cheering him on has given any indication that they have an alternative plan to accomplish what the single-payer options have achieved elsewhere.

Yeah, I know, we need to lose the morning-after bitterness. The people hath spoken, hath it not? Ours but to extract the wisdom from this surprising turnaround.

And what would that wisdom be? OK, that progressives shouldn't take anything for granted. We need to be more diligent? But also that this is an incredibly fickle electorate? A childishly impatient electorate? That even in this supposedly liberal state we are a lot more conservative than progressives thought? That we are a country that deserves its widespread health care misery? All of the above?

I hate to sound pessimistic, but I think the Coakley loss is more than just a political miscalculation on the part of Dems and progressives. We have more of a problem than that.

It should be a piece of cake in 2012 getting an electorate that elected George W. Bush, of all unlikely material, for two terms to go big time for the same basic philosophy packaged as the personable, handsome Scott Brown.

Just sayin.

Brent Harold of Wellfleet, a former English professor, is the author of "Wellfleet and the World." E-mail him at kinnacum@gmail.com.